Alba Emoting:
A safe, non-psychoanalytic approach to
releasing and guiding emotional states.
Actors can develop full emotional range, on-cue accessibility, and deep engagement with fellow actors without reliance on personal memories, sensory stimuli, or images. Alba Emoting is physical, specific, organic, and can be learned by nearly anyone.
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Alba Emoting was developed by neuroscientist Dr. Susana Bloch as a safe, purely physical alternative to emotion memory and other psychological techniques for releasing, maintaining, and controlling emotional states on stage.
Alba Emoting identifies six "basic" emotions from which all others derive. Each of the basic emotions, as well as emotional neutrality, has its own unique, identifiable set of bodily responses ("effector patterns") which are universal to all humans. By reproducing three aspects of these patterns — breathing, posture, and facial expression — an actor can experience and express genuine, organic emotion at will, without the use of memory or images.
Most important, through the use of the seventh pattern, called a "step- out," the actor can leave any emotion just as easily and return to psychophysical neutrality. The ability to return to emotional neutrality creates a solid foundation for safe emotional work, in class or in performance, and is therefore central to the Alba Emoting technique. Once learned correctly, the step-out pattern is effective regardless of how an emotional state was initially aroused.
Although Alba Emoting was developed as a technique for actors, exploration of therapeutic applications in the fields of psychology, sociology, and other human service vocations is well underway. Non-actors are welcome in most training sessions.
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